


Sometimes life comes out of nowhere and whacks you in the face

by craploadsofawesome



Category: Pitch Perfect (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-07-20 02:36:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7387204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/craploadsofawesome/pseuds/craploadsofawesome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stacie thinks of the tiny three year old toddler that came along with her stepfather on a twice-a-month, who loved climbing enormous trees and picking fights with random toddlers in the sandbox, and generally existed to drive her crazy on the times she was babysitting her step-sister. She remembers the rare but blinding smiles she was rewarded with when she played a rather catchy song, of the impromptu dance they would start doing in the kitchen. She thinks of the first time she thought of Beca as anything other than “that stepkid always bugging me”, the first time she acknowledged her as her sister, even with the lack of an actual blood connection (both the times being when that snotty pest, Bobby pushed a five year old Beca off the monkey bars, and she went in all guns blazing to rescue her; not that it was needed, Beca pushed herself up, and punched him in his stupid face, much to her amusement).<br/>The random high school AU featuring Stacie Conrad as a badass superspy, Beca Mitchell as her long lost step-sister, Chloe Beale as the girl who has to be protected and who is totally in love with aforementioned step-sister who also happens to be her best friend, and Aubrey Posen as teacher aforementioned superspy falls for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. How it begins

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The AU that was sort of inspired by an old Bollywood movie I watched a lot of time ago.

_There appear to be few things one can think about when hanging upside down from a ceiling beam, and Stacie is currently aware of the fact. The hook attached to the rope digs painfully into her back, and all the blood in her body is rushing to her head, which really doesn’t help the fact that she is supposed to be coming up with a plan right about now._

_“I thought you already had a plan?” Cynthia Rose whispers, voice sounding panicked “Because this is really not the time to tell me that I’ve been dangling in the air ten minutes for nothing!”_

_Stacie grits her teeth. Her head aches. And so does her back. Her neck. Her hands do too, and with them every other vital part of her body needed for launching a full frontal assault into a stronghold of the deadliest criminals, who were currently holding half the students of a high school hostage._

_“CR,” she whispers back “Shut up.”_

_“Did you just tell me to……?”_

_“Shut up,” she cuts into her junior’s indignant cry “So I can concentrate.”_

_“On?”_

_That is the exact moment three DSM operatives turn the corner, and in the dark, pass through where Stacie and Cynthia Rose are. With a silent and deadly hit of her hand to one man’s chest, Stacie knocks him unconscious, while her companion, catching on, quickly kicks the second one in the nuts, and muffles his groan, by stuffing her left glove in his mouth. The third goon does a roundabout, and tries to flee, but before he can take one step or make a sound, Stacie releases the harness, drops down, and sweeps his feet out from under him, with Cynthia catching him as he falls, and dragging him over to where his friends lay._

_“That,” Stacie says then, an answer to a previously asked question, and Cynthia grins at her in the dark._

_They split up, going different ways, and carefully checking and clearing each room. Stacie moves on autopilot, gun at the ready, not really thinking about what she is doing. Instead her mind is consumed with a million thoughts. She thinks of Beca, Chloe, her mother. Of Aubrey. She wonders if that was where it all started. When Aubrey walked into Barden High, with her pencil skirt, painfully professional shirt, an attitude that faintly screamed “Mess with me and you die” and a face that might as well have had ‘Stacie Conrad is going to fall in love with this’ tattooed on it. Or maybe it was before all of that. When Officer Beale summoned her into his office to present her with a new mission._

_She is so lost in her musing, that she misses the man hidden behind the door, and nearly gets killed for it. He moves suddenly, using the dark to his advantage, and holding her at gunpoint before she can do a thing. There they stand, in an abandoned room, guns pointed at each other._

_Stacie takes stock of the situation. She stares him down, looks into his cruel eyes, at the face tattoo that extends from above his right eyebrow, across his cheek and down to his neck. One sudden move and he could raise the alarm. There was no way she was going to risk shooting him and making any sort of noise. She was out of options. Except if…….._

_She suddenly looks at a point on the wall right behind him, and allows her face to fall into a puzzled expression. To her extreme surprise, it actually works. The man falters for a second, torn between keeping her in his line of sight and turning to access the apparent new threat, and it allows her to twist around the gun, and wrestle it out of his hands. With a swift kick to his solar plexus he goes down silently, and she stretches her hands over her head, pops the joints in her shoulders, and looks at his body strewn on the floor._

_This was where it all started, she thinks. With death._

                                                                                  *****************

Hospitals are crappy places to have intense conversations in. There are always snooty nurses entering to tell you to “Keep your voice down, dear”, doctors asking for peace and quiet for the patient or your colleagues telling you to “Calm the fuck down, Conrad”, though what they mean by telling you to calm down when your father essentially says he is going to die, Stacie doesn’t know. Maybe there is some kind of handbook on Hospitals and Grief she should have gone through.

“Don’t be an idiot!”

“Do I need to remind you that this is your senior officer you are addressing thus?”

She raises her eyebrows at him till he grins weakly, because she knows that no matter how imposing he seems in uniform, there is no way he could ever pull rank over his daughter.

“Stacie, listen to me……”

“No, I’m not going to till you stop being ridiculous. Of course you’re going to be fine. We just need to talk to the doctor, maybe think about alternative solutions or something………”

“There are no alternative solutions, sweetheart. Not anymore.”

She hears the words clearly, and for a while her face crumples. Then she sees the pain on her father’s face, and pulls herself together. Not now, she thinks, and with what seems like a massive effort, composes herself. Smiles tightly, and waving her hand as if waving the matter away, tries to change the topic.

“Did I tell you about today’s stakeout? Five hours in the cramped car with Officer Ryder glaring at me every second of it. I spent all of that time fighting the urge to apologize for existing.”

Not that shutting pain down and keeping it inside does any good. But she looks at her father’s relieved face, and thinks that if not permanent, it’s a pretty good alternative to facing it head on right now.

                                                                                   *****************

She visits every day. Well, most days. There are some days she can’t tear herself away from the duties her country requires of her, so she sends one of her friends in her place, and the next day she comes armed with his favorite donuts. They talk of things that don’t have anything to do with cancer, hospitals or death, and she immediately switches to something else when her father says “Stacie, listen, sweetheart….”

That is a conversation for later.

                                                                                   *****************

There are bad days, and good ones. There are times when their conversations consist of her father’s delirious ramblings and her trying to make sense of them. On other days, her father talks with perfect clarity, telling her of his old missions, and asking her about her current ones. Today started off as one of the bad days. Most of the things he’s said since the morning have been unintelligible mumblings of names and places, so she doesn’t put a lot of stock into today. Just sits beside him and listens.

When he falls asleep for a while, she goes up to the cafeteria for a bottle of water. When she comes back, she sees her father struggling with two nurses in his bed. Leaving the half-drunk bottle on the table, she rushes to his side.

“Dad! Dad! It’s okay, it’s okay….”

“Stacie!” he’s saying, repeatedly, eyes roving all over the room, and waving his hands around in his confusion. She grabs his hands, and looks him right in the eyes.

“Dad, I’m right here. Look at…….look at me. It’s me.”

“Beca,” he says, with more clarity than he’s displayed today “Beca.”

Stacie freezes, her heart throbbing with the sudden clench of pain that overcomes her every time she hears her sister’s name.

“Beca,” her father says again.

“What about Beca, dad?”

“After I’m…….after I’m gone…..”

She starts shaking her head, but he pushes on “You’ll find her, won’t you? Find Beca……….and tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t,” he’s started crying in the middle, and she tries to shush him “Tell her I loved her. Always.”

“I think she knows,” she tells him, an empty consolation, but he’s already drifted off to his delirious mumblings.

                                                                                      *****************

She holds his hand as he dies. She supposes that, to an outsider, it seems pretty anticlimactic. He falls asleep at night, and she falls asleep in the uncomfortable chair at his bedside. She wakes up to the sound of the beeping machines, and is pushed out of the doctors as they try to revive him. They succeed, but she knows that it’s not a victory worth celebrating.

The doctor breaks it down for her. He tells her that it is almost an impossibility to come back from the deterioration the tumor has put his internal organs through. That he happens to be in pain. A lot of pain. That it might be better if she just……

She goes for a long, long walk. Sits on a bench for an hour, and feeds a stray dog the remains of a packet of biscuits lying in her jacket. After a full three hours she goes back, and sits beside her father for a while, committing his features to her memory. Then, abruptly, she gets up, signs the required papers, and holds her father’s hand as the machines are switched off.

                                                                                         *****************

Then, she goes home and cries.

                                                                                         *****************

Officer Beale gives her a whole month, before he calls her into his office. She is thankful for that much, because she knows that crime waits for no one, especially not for the grieving daughter of a military officer who dedicated his entire life to eradicating it. She hears him out, and is unpleasantly surprised at the end of it.

“You want me to go………..babysit your daughter?” she asks, disbelief lacing every word “Sir, considering my qualifications, and the fact that I have been a part of the DSM Committee for almost three years now, I’d have thought…..”

“I know all of that,” he tells her, a hint of steel in his voice that warns her against crossing over to the territory of insubordination “And I’d like it if you listen to the whole thing before you start protesting.”

She stays quiet and allows him to speak. He continues.

“As you very well know, I have been a part of the DSM committee since it was formed. I was recruited for it along with your father, and have had a pretty important role in deciding most of the moves we’ve taken against them. A month after I was appointed to head that particular division, I was informed of a death threat they had sent my daughter,” at this point his voice trembles a bit, and Stacie thinks of her own father, feeling a familiar dull ache in her chest that always accompanies the thought of him “Obviously they were planning to either hold her as leverage or……I asked her to come live with me, so I could provide her with protection, but she refused.”

“What? Why?”

“Things between the both of us are……tense, at best. She blames me for ruining her childhood, like I don’t do enough of that to myself already.”

“At the cost of her own life?”

“You don’t know how stubborn Chloe is,” he says, a wry smile twisting his face “She’ll do everything she can in her power to avoid asking me for help.”

She must look uncertain, because he starts speaking again after the short pause “You look like you’re hesitating.”

Stacie wonders how to say “But this is a babysitting operation”without sounding like an idiot recruit and possibly without being sent to Siberia or Iceland “It certainly sounds……interesting, Sir.”

He sees through it easily “What if I tell you something that will sweeten the offer?”

She stares suspiciously at him, eyes boring into his suddenly twinkling ones.

“What if I told you that you could find your sister in the same school where my daughter studies? That interesting enough for you?”

Stacie tries to take a deep breath, and finds that she can’t. It suddenly seems physically impossible for her lungs to do something she’s had no trouble doing since she was born. She ends up gasping for air in an imitation of a fish very much out of water.

“Beca? Beca’s there?”

“I’m sure you knew how hard your father tried to find his daughter all his life after his ex-wife…….shifted homes without informing him. He confided in me about his hopeless search, which is how I knew of her. Imagine my surprise when her name came up in the list I pulled up to analyze potential threats, the list of students attending Barden High. You knew her well, I take it?”

Knew her? Stacie thinks of the tiny three year old toddler that came along with her stepfather on a twice-a-month basis, who loved climbing enormous trees and picking fights with random toddlers in the sandbox, and generally existed to drive her crazy on the times she was babysitting her step-sister. She remembers the rare but blinding smiles she was rewarded with when she played a rather catchy song, of the impromptu dance they would start doing in the kitchen. She thinks of the first time she thought of Beca as anything other than “that stepkid always bugging me”, the first time she acknowledged her as her sister, even with the lack of an actual blood connection (both the times being when that snotty pest, Bobby pushed a five year old Beca off the monkey bars, and she went in all guns blazing to rescue her; not that it was needed, Beca pushed herself up, and punched him in his stupid face, much to her amusement).

She nods, slightly, and notices Officer Beale turn away respectfully to give her time to wipe her tears away “We, lost contact when she was eight. I was eighteen.”

“And you want to find her, of course?”

“More than anything, Sir,” she replies, squaring her shoulders and looking him in the eyes. He doesn’t seem at all surprised by the expression of fierce intensity she knows she is wearing; she supposes that is because they are both fighting for their family in some way, Stacie to find that which was lost, and Beale to hold onto that which was forgotten “I’ll do it.”

They shake hands, and for the first time since her father’s death, she doesn’t feel quite so lost. She has a purpose now. She is going to find her sister, protect the crap out of Chloe Beale, end as many DSM operatives as possible and hopefully, get out of high school alive.

(The last part seems more formidable than the rest of her tasks put together; based on her own experiences, DSM operatives have nothing on mean girls, who cut, wound, and slice with mere words.)

(Okay that line was an exaggeration. But by only, like, a tiny, tiny, minus infinity bit.)

And that is how, Stacie Conrad finds herself at the gates of Barden High, for the first time in her extremely dangerous military career, more than a little terrified of what comes next.  


	2. Saving asses and making friends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The AU that was sort of inspired by an old Bollywood movie I watched a lot of time ago.

Beca Mitchell hates her.

Beca Mitchell doesn’t know who she is.

Rewinding back a couple of steps:

Stacie arrives at Barden High fully prepared to do a lot of scouring, a lot of spy work before she can establish some kind of connection to Chloe and then get down to tracking down her step-sister. This is a pretty big responsibility she has been entrusted with, and she knows it is not going to be that easy that she’s just going to waltz in and things will just fall into place.

Except, they sort of do.

Chloe Beale is really, really friendly. She has a voice brighter than the fucking sun on a summer day, and she sounds so chirpy it seems like joy is oozing out of every word she says. She takes one look at Stacie who has been wandering around the corridors, probably looking as lost as she felt, and rushes over to stand in front of her.

“Hi!” she says, smiling wide, and accompanied by a dorky looking guy who is apparently involved in a losing battle with his shirt sleeve.

“Hey,” she says back, surprised that her target has already come to her and is ready to be……acquired.

“I’m Chloe, this is Benji, and you seem lost.”

“She also seems older,” the guy mutters, still fiddling with his hands.

Chloe’s smile falters for a bit, and she nudges her friend in his stomach with her elbow. Hard. Which Stacie feels a sort of satisfaction at, because she knows she is older but seriously is it that obvious?

“ _Yes_ ,” says a tiny voice into her ears from the earpiece she has been walking around with, and of course the Gods couldn’t bless every minute of her day, which is why it seems like Fat Amy is her current handler.

“Benji….,” Chloe tries “Remember when we were working on your mouth-filtering techniques?”

“No, it’s okay,” she says “How old did you think I was?”

“ _Forty_ ,” Amy cackles loudly.

“College, I guess, in your early twenties or something?”

She smiles “Benji, I think we are going to be great friends.”

And it has nothing to do with the fact that she’s actually twenty six.

                                                                                    *************

Chloe sort of adopts her as her new to Barden, lost puppy _esqe_ adult, which, speaking as Lieutenant Stacie Conrad is very helpful, because it gives her an automatic in with most of the people around her. Chloe shows her around the buildings, and accompanies her to all of her classes which is convenient, since they share most of them (thanks, IT guy). Stacie keeps her eye peeled for any glimpse of Beca, but doesn’t see her till half of the day has passed. That’s when her sister makes an entrance.

(Stacie is starting to think she’s not doing any actual searching or exploring on this mission if people keep pointing themselves out with these grand entrances.)

It is lunch time, and she’s sitting in the shade of a huge tree, eating a sandwich, when the whole scene acts out. It starts with a gorgeous Harley Davidson shooting into the parking lot, followed by a shiny red Cadillac and a jeep. The driver is wearing a helmet, so, she gives them an interested glance for maybe a minute, and then turns backs to her very uninteresting lunch. She doesn’t look up until the commotion reaches her ears, and when it does, when she realizes that the hullabaloo is centered around the parking lot, specifically the area where she’s parked her Audi R8, she’s hurrying there, food forgotten in the face of danger to her beloved car.

“Who the hell parked here?” an irritated voice is saying as Stacie shuffles through the crowd, and hears the voice of her sister in God-knows-how-many years, and then sees her, in the flesh.

The kid grew up, is her first thought, which is possibly the stupidest thought anybody in her position could have had, since considering the number of years that have passed since their last meeting, but the thing is, she’s not exactly in the condition to be making any sort of literary descriptions. She’s still reeling from the shock of seeing her sister, and the feeling that’s coursing through her body is indescribable. Rebecca Mitchell, her Beca, is standing in front of her.

Beca is tiny. She has got headphones dangling from her neck, wearing a black shirt that says “Fuck me, I’m awesome” and the grungy punk-rock-chick look that screams “Whatever it is, I don’t care”. She also has her father’s eyes, and is currently using them to glare bloody murder at the parking spot.

Stacie takes a deep breath, and steps forward.

“It’s mine,” she says.

Beca turns her cool angry eyes towards her, and Stacie holds her breath, steeling herself against the extremely remote possibility of Beca somehow knowing who she is, but there is no recognition in her gaze.

“It’s my spot,” Beca tells her.

There’s a collective ‘Ooohh’ from the student body surrounding them, and abruptly, at one look from Beca, they fall silent. Or, at least, till one brave heart screams “Fight” from the back of the crowd. Then, before Beca’s face can undergo a change from angry to annoyed, people start picking it up, and within five minutes, everybody is shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight” loudly, and quite enthusiastically.

The few people accompanying Beca huddle up next to her, and there’s a furious whispered discussion, frequented with mentions of “That chick”, and angry looks directed at her. Stacie waits, unconcerned. There’s a tap at her shoulder, and she turns to see Benji standing behind her.

“Dude, you don’t mess with Beca Mitchell.”

“You don’t?” she asks him, casually.

“She’s scary, bro. She could probably kill you, wipe out every last trace of your existence from this world, and get away with it, easy.”

She shrugs, not telling him that she’s personally done that to about twenty people in her career, and enjoyed a sandwich at the end of it.

“I’ll be fine, Benji.”

He still looks worried, and she watches him back away from her, hurrying to somewhere else. Then she turns her attention to her sister, who has probably been watching her for a while now “You sure you don’t want to back out, newbie?” she asks, casually cracking her knuckles.

Stacie just smiles.

                                                                                    *************

**TWO HOURS LATER**

_“So that was anticlimactic,”_ Amy says in her ear.

“Yeah, it was,” she murmurs through the corner of her mouth “She swung the first punch, I ducked, with years of practice and instinctual natural talents, and before she could try for another, Chloe turned up, and stopped the whole thing.”

Right before the principal turned up, at that. They’d barely escaped with a minute to spare, and then Chloe turned to Beca and started screaming at her so much, her sister was looking thoroughly chastened.

“But she insulted me……”

“So you start fighting, and risk suspension?”

“It was a matter of my honor!”

Chloe swats Beca hard on her head “You don’t fight Stacie, okay? She’s a friend.”

Beca’s mouth falls open in disbelief “You cannot be serious. I mean, Chlo, she…….she’s annoying. There is no way she’s hanging around us.”

“Really?” Chloe steps back, and crosses her arms “Because we’re friends now, and I say she’s hanging around for as long as I am.”

Beca pouts, which looks extremely out of place on her trying-to-look-badass face, and there is a furious whispered discussion between her and Chloe, but it looks like she loses at the end, because she storms off to pace angrily a few steps away from her group. A girl comes over to Stacie, and she looks up at her.

“Hi,” the girl says, holding out her hand “I’m Emily.” Then he gestures to the other people sitting, and starts telling her names “That’s Ashley, Jessica, and Jesse. And you are…..”

“Stacie,” she smiles at her, and shakes her hand “You’re friends with GrumpyPants over there?”

“Don’t let her hear you call her that,” she warns, grinning “Seriously, Thank God Chloe was here today. I don’t know what she’d have done to you.”

“Punched her to a pulp, probably” Beca mutters, in a threatening manner, as she wanders close.

“You would have?” Chloe enquires, eyes glinting with combat combined with a hint of mischief “I heard Stacie had the upper hand before I came.”

Beca turns red, with anger or from embarrassment, Stacie can’t tell, and but then Chloe puts a placating arm on her shoulder, and she goes calm.

“ _So, your sister and this Chloe chick are friends_?” Amy suddenly pipes up.

Stacie watches the pair, at the easy, familiar way Chloe touches Beca, the way the tension leaves her body at the touch, and feels curious.

“Yeah,” she replies, after a moment “Friends.”

                                                                                   *************

The thing is, they’re not _just_ friends.

Because Stacie’s has had ‘just friends’ who were actually just friends, and ‘just friends’ who weren’t, so she’s had experiences with this sort of thing. There is nothing overtly non-platonic about Chloe and Beca’s relationship, but there happens to be an undertone of something so distinctly………easy about it, that it makes the occasional observer look twice, and then look away, curiously uncomfortable. Because it makes Stacie uncomfortable staring too, like she’s intruding on something very private, whenever she just glances over at one of their interactions. It’s in all the little things, in the way Beca will come to school looking like hell, and one “Hi” from Chloe will make something close to a smile appear. It’s when Beca is ranting about something, all pissed off, and Chloe would rub her shoulders, and all her tension melts away like it never even existed.

Most of it, though, is the way they look at each other when they don’t think the other one is looking. Stacie usually cringes at clichés, but the way Chloe looks at Beca is, while completely obvious, also happens to compare to the way somebody looks at the whole world when they’re standing on top of a really tall mountain, at the edge of the world, like nothing could ever compare to that. In fact, it is so obvious; everybody except Beca can see it clearly. All of their friends just roll their eyes, and nudge each other good-naturedly when they do something coupl _ey_.

“You’ve seen how they are with each other,” Jesse says one day, as they’re lounging on the bleachers, watching them sitting together, Beca’s head on Chloe’s lap as the latter reads a book.

“And yet they’re not together?” Stacie asks him, raising an eyebrow.

“Beca’s sort of an idiot, if you haven’t noticed yet,” he points out “So, no, they’re not together. But Chloe…….well, Chloe is the only one Beca sees,” he continues, with a wistful tone that indicates that he may have harbored some not-just-friendly feelings towards her sister once upon a time “And Chloe happens to be hopelessly in love with Beca. I…..I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen with the pair. We’ve all been waiting for them to sort their shit out for years.”

“And from the looks of it, you probably will have to for many years to come,” she quips, and he laughs out loud.

“Speaking of shit, side note,” he starts, after a while “When are you and Beca going to sort yours out?”

She groans.

                                                                                  *************

Beca really hates her.

It’s been about two weeks, and she’s shown no signs of thawing. Stacie is liked by all of her friends, and has a good rapport with Jesse and Emily, but her sister seems to still be harping on about insults and honor and reputation, and no matter how hard Stacie tries, she gets rebuffed every time she approaches Beca. It makes her sad, the longing for a relationship that existed years ago, and that one half of the equation doesn’t even know exists. This is an entirely new Beca, far from the vivacious, full-of-life child she watched grow up. This version of her walks around pissed off at the world, and giving off angst vibes like nobody’s business, and even Chloe’s attempts at a tentative truce have failed.

In fact, Beca refuses to acknowledge her very existence till a few days later, when things come to a head during the Unicycle dare.

                                                                                  *************

Stacie doesn’t get the exact details of the events that resulted in Beca being dangled from the top of the rooftops of the Science building till quite later. Quite, quite later, when they’re not in any immediate danger of falling to their deaths. Emily informs her of all of it. It turns out that Unicycle had challenged Beca to a race up the top of the building, that would culminate in a skateboard race across the rooftops, and Beca had, with all of her swagger, proudly accepted.

“Nobody really knows what actually happened,” Emily tells her “But I think Unicycle stumbled a bit, and sent his skateboard crashing into Beca’s who lost her balance and rolled down the rooftops till she was hanging from one hand.”

Stacie herself doesn’t remember how it actually happened. One minute she was in math class staring out the window at a distant figure hanging from the adjacent building, and hearing a loud whisper of “Is that Mitchell?” from one of her classmates, the next she was dashing through the classroom, jumping out a window, and performing all sorts of acrobatics that would surely put her in deep suspicion if viewed by an actual high school student to reach the roofs of the other building. She doesn’t remember anything except for the deep panic, and intense fear she felt, till she was leaning over Beca, and asking her to grab her hand.

She shudders, thinking of the immense height, and as if trying to reassure herself, looks over at her sister, who is currently being looked over by a still sort-of-numb-with-shock Chloe. The other girl has just stared at Beca, when they finally came down the building, and the look in her eyes was so steely, even Stacie had been scared for Beca.  Then Chloe had stepped forward, and as she and her sister looked at each other, all of it had melted away into relief that was so clear, it was almost palpable. Now they were standing in each other’s space, too close yet oddly comfortable.

She closes her eyes, suddenly bone weary of the emotional and physical rollercoaster she’s been through.

“Hey, you okay?” Emily asks her, worriedly “You didn’t hit your head or anything, right? It was all so fast, I mean, you were so fast……………one moment it was just Beca, and the next you were standing there, out of nowhere. How did you get there so…..” when she doesn’t complete her question, Stacie opens her eyes, to look at her, and instead sees Beca standing over her, awkwardly.

“Hey,” she says “You alright?”

“Yeah,” Beca says, fiddling with her jacket.

“Hope this teaches you not to go rushing off the top of tall buildings.”

“Yeah, I’m not wandering near tall places anytime soon.”

“ _You better not_ ” is what she wants to say, but that would be such a big sister thing to say that she refrains from it, instead giving her a thumbs up. There is a moment of silence, and then Beca speaks again.

“You, uh, didn’t have to do that. Save my ass, I mean.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“I mean,” Beca continues, not meeting her eyes “It was stupid of me. I shouldn’t have done that…..you were really”

“Is that your way of saying thank you? Because you suck at it.”

“I don’t do that shit,” she replies, reflexively.

“Neither do I,” Stacie assures her.

“Then let’s not.”

She extends a fist, and Stacie bumps it with her own, taking it for the olive branch that it is.

“Just, no more surprises for a while.”

“Amen to that,” Stacie says, with feeling.

And because life happens to be so good at listening to heartfelt wishes, it sends her Aubrey Posen within the week.

 


End file.
